“Leaving me? I’m leaving him.”
“Well good.” Lana put more liquor in her own glass. “Now I can tell you what I really think about him. I’ve been waiting for years. You know I’m not patient.” Lana tried to remember the comments, any comments she’d heard about Henry at her salon. Were there knowing looks she should have recognized? Maybe once, a very pretty young girl had mentioned Henry, she wouldn’t mind some of that, or some other fool talk she’d said, and the salon had gone quiet. The girl had not remembered or maybe she didn’t know Lana’s connection to Henry. The women in the salon had not looked directly at Lana but they all waited for her response. Lana should have realized what that silence could have meant. The silence allowed the space for a secret.
“One day I want to hear every word of it,” Ava said as she got water from the sink. Lana had a sleeve of Dixie cups in a holder beside the faucet. The sight of it almost made her laugh out loud. The last Dixie cups on earth. Ava used to pretend she was a giant with the Dixie cup in her hand, the bottom soon soggy with liquid, bulged out threatening to break. She remembered the one-handed sensation of crushing the paper cup with her powerful and decisive grip while the waxy outside of the cup crumbled and flaked like icing on a doughnut. “I saw him in Walmart.”
“The baby?”
“The child. He’s five.”
“Shit.” Lana reached out and held Ava’s hand. “Is he pretty?”
“Who? The boy?”
“The boy.”
Ava nodded. The frightened moon face of that black-haired boy took up all the space in her memory.
“That’s even worse. Be good if he was a little troll.”
Ava half-smiled at Lana who always managed to say the unexpected thing. “I would prefer it,” Ava said.
Lana picked up the glass and drained it quickly without a wince. She thought, for not the first time, that she really should drink more. “Listen to me, Ava. I know you’re hurting right now. But I want you to see this as a chance.”
“Why would you say something like that? That’s not what you say to somebody whose marriage is over.” At the first good opening Ava would get out this house.
“Don’t get mad. Don’t get mad. To tell you the truth that’s exactly what you should say to somebody leaving a sorry marriage.” Lana rubbed her finger along her glass and stared at the ring of irretrievable brown liquor caught in the bottom. She knew Ava watched her but pretended to be absorbed in the intricate pattern on her glass.
“Maybe you know this and maybe you don’t, but I got myself in a situation.” Lana gestured to her room, her home. “Sometimes by yourself, without some pain, I mean, you can’t think of a good enough reason to do what you need to. Women are sometimes like that. A man will pack his longings in a minute. If a man gets tired of us, he takes the first train out. But us.” Lana sighed. “We always have a hundred good reasons why we can’t make the change. You understand me?”
Ava listened but did not speak.
“But if you get a little luck. I know it doesn’t seem like luck,” Lana said as she held up her hand to stop Ava from speaking. “If you get lucky, a way out can present itself. You hear me? You have the push you need.”
“I loved him.” Why Ava felt like she needed to say it she wasn’t sure.
“You still love him. Who said anything about that? This has nothing in the world to do with love. He never was and he’ll never be what you want. You know and I know that you’d have never left him otherwise.”
“That’s not true, Lana. It’s not. When we were young it was different.”
“I guess it was. At least you thought it had a chance to be different.” Lana nodded the bottle in Ava’s direction. Ava covered her glass with her hand.
“He’s pretty but he ain’t shit. You know it. Something’s wrong with him. You know it’s true. And another thing, I better not hear you defend him again.”
Lana’s hair was pulled back in a severe bun with a couple of short tendrils stuck out from the top of it. On Lana the imperfection looked intentional. She wore no makeup but her skin was slick and dewy like a girl’s skin with only the slightest hint of jowl and a weariness around her eyes that made them look like they weren’t fully open. Those small telltale signs announced her as an older woman. Ava had thought that women in her mother’s generation were so far removed from her that they might not be the same species. It took great pain for her to realize she was a woman in the world of grown women.
“I hear you, Lana. I hear you.” Ava wiped her eyes and drank the last of her water. “Lana,” Ava began. She wanted to ask how she could have missed that Lana was a woman, how she could have known her aunt all of her life and not know a damn thing about her. Ava couldn’t think how to say any of it.
“This is a chance, my girl. See it. Can you?”
17
Carrie waited for Henry like she always did. He was late of course, like he always was. “Why do you put up with that?” her sister asked her a hundred times.
“It’s not that big of a deal,” she’d said, and it wasn’t. When you love somebody you decide what you can take and what will kill you and work backward from what will kill you. It’s as simple as that. At least this is what she told herself. You have to have a good story that binds the whole mess together. Most people construct the story to explain the life later, but people living the crazy make up the story as they go. Right there in the moment. She wasn’t a mistress, she was a girlfriend waiting for her man to get his affairs together to move out. She wasn’t a fool, she was a mother not giving up on a man because life with him was hard. Hadn’t she been chosen? The thing about being chosen that her sister never understood is the exhilaration, the knowing that he wants you. Women do anything for that. Carrie knew she wasn’t thinking about the situation like a feminist. But from what Carrie had seen everybody called herself a feminist until a man gets involved. Then it’s to the chosen go the spoils.